Night and Fog in Japan (Nagisa Oshima, 1960)

Night and Fog in Japan is a difficult film, but I feel like it was an appropriate choice as the first of a pair of the director's early films which opened the Wexner Center's month-long Oshima retrospective on Friday, May 1. The touring retrospective, which is the first of Oshima's work in North American in more than two decades, was organized by renowned curator and film scholar James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario and is comprised of eleven films in its Columbus encarnation.

Quandt was on hand to introduce the evening's films (he also gave a rather, ahem, thinly attended, while extremely informative, lecture earlier in the day where he mostly read from his own notes on the retrospective before taking questions from the dozen or so attendees). Quandt noted that even Oshima scholars agree it would take multiple viewings to fully grasp everything that the Japanese auteur was getting at with Fog. Knowing next to nothing about Japanese history as I do (in particular, the student rebellions and left-wing struggles of the post-war era, subjects Oshima frequently addressed in his film) surely didn’t help.

The plot centered around the wedding of two political activists which is repeatedly interrupted by guests, both invited and not on the guest-list, who are keen on dredging up events from the couple's past. These scenes deal primarily with numerous characters yelling at each other, accusing others of betraying their friends/not being true to the cause/various infidelities/etc. Oshima's long takes (especially the films opening shot where the camera glides through a forest on a foggy night into the wedding hall) are impressive, the performances (mostly) admirable, but unfortunately, there just wasn't too much immediately compelling about this wedding.

It's in the numerous flashbacks that the film thrives. Oshima gets stylistically experimental with these sequences, highly theatrical in their form. We're treated to elaborate staging and lighting, with character fading in and out of the scenes, more Mizoguchi-esque floating long takes, characters giving testimony to the camera, and more. We also learn more about the characters and their issues with one another. It's in these scenes where we get most of the social theory and political rhetoric. My understanding was that the problems the characters have with each other are mostly the result of conflicting views on how to approach left-wing activism in Post-war Japan, but I don't think I could get much more specific than that (some of them though singing and dancing bred camaraderie, others didn't...that's all I got). Like I said, it's a hard flick.

But definitely not a bad one. The trick was to kind of just let myself go with the flow of the narrative even if I didn't necessarily, you know, get all of what was going on. Visually, it was more that interesting enough to keep my attention and I can say with confidence that its reverence (with a disclaimer: Not Immediately Accessible) in Oshima's oeuvre is deserved. It's a dense film, but an important one. Hopefully a forthcoming DVD release will give me a chance to dig a little deeper into an interesting early film from a true original of Japanese cinema. [B-]